I wonder how much faster phones need to be for it not to matter (i.e. native is still faster, but not noticeably). Would dual core be enough? Assuming the engines can scale behind the scenes for us, how many cores would be needed?
This would change everything, especially for the iPhone's walled gargen (unless new apps appear that require the extra power - perhaps console-quality games? complex visualizations)
Intel managed an amazing trick, of keeping demand for more processing power strong for decades (from 1978 to 1998; when the celeron was introduced, for the market that valued low price over performance; and 2008, the Atom for low power consumption over performance). But to really compete against ARM requires letting go of the blessing and the curse of back-compatibility - which Intel hasn't succeeded at so far (see Itanium). The demand for performance seems to be ending, and I expect with it, Intel will also - perhaps by 2018.
iOS's JavaScript engine and version of WebKit is single-threaded; dual core won't help (this isn't strictly true, but there's a global lock that they both acquire). No support for WebWorkers either
This would change everything, especially for the iPhone's walled gargen (unless new apps appear that require the extra power - perhaps console-quality games? complex visualizations)
Intel managed an amazing trick, of keeping demand for more processing power strong for decades (from 1978 to 1998; when the celeron was introduced, for the market that valued low price over performance; and 2008, the Atom for low power consumption over performance). But to really compete against ARM requires letting go of the blessing and the curse of back-compatibility - which Intel hasn't succeeded at so far (see Itanium). The demand for performance seems to be ending, and I expect with it, Intel will also - perhaps by 2018.